Nick Norwitz
speaker
450 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Nick Norwitz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The way we go about modern medicine now is trying to prune the tree as the branches grow. The fact of the matter is they're just gonna keep growing back. And I think the mind shift we need is to look at the roots in the soil, which are these underlying pathologies, things you mentioned, like insulin resistance and inflammation, that are at the root of all chronic metabolic disease.
And when we make that mind shift, we can gain insight into, I think, how we can more potently address disease, and also why certain fundamental interventions might hit a lot of different diseases. Like, yeah, depression and schizophrenia in addition to obesity. And it's not because it's snake oil.
It's because they all have the same underlying dysfunctions that just manifest differently in different people with different susceptibilities.
I figured I hadn't, I might have like heard, I don't know where I heard it, but I'm like, I couldn't have created this. It's just so obvious.
A few things I want to respond to there. One, with respect to why doctors don't order these sort of tests. I mean, first rule of medicine is don't order a test if you're not going to do anything with it or you don't know what to do with it. So I think a lot of people don't know, you know, if somebody comes back with a high insulin resistance score, there's not a pill for that.
So how are you going to manage it in the current, you know, medical system? Whereas, you know, if you measure an LDL cholesterol, we very clearly have a pill that can target that biomarker and you can get an easy win on paper. I'm not saying that, you know, statins don't have their place, but in terms of like why someone would test for one thing and not another, it is the treating clinician.
What are they equipped to handle in terms of data? How do they know how to manage the results and what tools do they have to prescribe?
So the second thing I wanted to say, you just alluded to it when you're like, eat better, eat less, is circling back to what I used to see nutrition as, which I thought was a fluffy science. And I think a lot of conventional medicine still sees it as a fluffy science. Take that as, you know, the internalized perspective of what nutrition is.
And now I am juxtaposing that, contrasting that to what I'm studying. We were talking about a few things offline, but things that I read that come out like every day, every week in the metabolic health literature that are just jaw dropping.
like a couple examples i was was mentioning was how the body produces cyanide to boost metabolism like that's weird i didn't expect that or how there are cells in the brain support cells called astrocytes that can literally like reach out cytoplasmic arms and connect with neurons and suck out damaged proteins and then donate healthy mitochondria
Yeah, so the pathological hallmarks of the, you know, leading neurodegenerative diseases, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, they come down to misfolded proteins. Imagine if you had a cell in the brain that could stick its arm into a neuron, pull these out, oh, and by the way, these damaged proteins harmed mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell, so let's replace those.
You stick another arm in, and you give the healthy mitochondria. Like that's something that literally happens in the human brain. A lot of this is in the area of preclinical.
You can imagine this is a very hard thing to study in a living human, but just understanding the fundamentals of the physiology, the biology, the metabolism, gives us insight into one, just how remarkable our bodies are, and two, gives us insight into how we can tweak these systems
in profound way to get astonishing results, like lowering your cholesterol with Oreo cookies or like, you know, sucking damaged proteins out of brain cells. They can give a lot of examples.
But so the reason I want to frame these two things and I want to add in another element is what you said about people just throwing their hands up in the air and being like, too complicated, I'm done. I'll just do whatever.
If they can't figure it out, what am I supposed to do? What I hate is the platitudes around nutrition. Things like eat a balanced diet, eat the rainbow. I think they're just so useless because they're just platitudes. They have no deeper level of thought. And on the other hand, you have this really cool physiology
But if I say to a person, isn't it cool that glycine can increase cyanide production in lysosomes, it's gonna go completely over their head. So how do you, as a communicator,
Take your love and awe for metabolism and health and transform it into nuanced functional takeaways for people so you can bring them along the journey of genuine learning and exciting them about this physiology while not just giving them platitudes, but give them takeaways that are actionable, which hopefully does not include chugging cyanide or misleading information around that.
You can see how it becomes an ecosystem of confusion, I guess you could say. And like, how do you give people the respect of feeding them a nuanced message while also not confusing them is I think a really interesting challenge that I've had at the front of my mind for the last year.
To frame up why this is so important, I would first say that we've already mentioned that carbohydrate-restricted diets can help with a broad range of conditions. With ketogenic diets potentially helping with like severe mental illnesses, depression, schizophrenia, bipolar,
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